6 Ways to Teach ELA Skills with Music

By: Presto Plans

In my experience, few things capture middle and high school students’ attention as effectively as teaching with music! I love incorporating music into secondary ELA classrooms whenever I can - especially contemporary music that students can relate to. In my experience, learning experiences that involve music can help to make tricky language arts skills and concepts (like grammar!) feel less intimidating for students.

If you’re interested in putting a musical twist on your ELA lessons, here are six of my favorite ways to teach ELA skills with music!

1) Figurative Language

If your students are struggling with figurative language terms, why not examine them through the lens of music? Popular songs are packed with creative examples of figurative language - perfect for teaching and reinforcing this essential ELA concept!

I find song lyrics are especially useful at the beginning of a poetry unit. Many middle and high school students can find poetry challenging, outdated, or overwhelming! Teaching with music can help remind them that poetry is everywhere, and for everyone! An introductory lesson that uses popular song lyrics to demonstrate various types of figurative language in action is a perfect “hook” for your students.

Presenting engaging, relevant examples to middle and high school students can help familiarize students with the most common types of figurative language they will encounter in the poems they read. For example, students can explore examples of assonance through lyrics from Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.”

I wake up screaming from dreaming

One day I'll watch as you're leaving

And life will lose all its meaning

2) Poetry Analysis 

Introducing your poetry unit through the lens of music can often make this genre less intimidating to middle school or high school students. Once they start making connections to their favorite songs, students might be surprised to learn how much they already know about poetry! In my experience, a station activity involving music can be a great way to introduce (or reinforce) new skills and concepts. As students move from station to station, they can listen to a variety of different songs, read through lyrics, and practice their poetry analysis skills!

When you feel students are ready to take their skills to the next level, you can help them put their poetry analysis skills to the test through a flexible, choice-based learning task! First, students select a (school-appropriate) song of their choice. Next, they showcase their poetry analysis skills by summarizing the lyrics, analyzing the title of the song, and exploring its themes. Finally, students can identify and interpret the various literary devices and figures of speech within the song’s lyrics!

3) Teaching New Idioms

Whether your students are learning English as a second language, or simply making sense of the various quirks of ELA, teaching common idioms with music can be a lot of fun. Song lyrics provide an excellent springboard for discussion about idioms like “climb the walls” and “head in the clouds!”

One engaging way to reinforce students’ understanding of some of the more common idioms that appear in the English language is by playing a matching game. For this activity, students receive a selection of cards that contain lyrics from popular songs (including an idiom!). From here, they must examine a second set of cards, which explain the meaning of various idioms. Working alone or in pairs, students then match the idioms with their explanations!

4) Growth Mindset

Another great thing about using music in the classroom is that it can help empower your students to adopt a growth mindset! Connecting music to the concept of growth mindset can support student learning in all subject areas. Many popular songs contain themes of resilience and perseverance, and can help to foster a positive outlook on both learning and personal development.

One activity that can help middle and high school students cultivate a growth mindset involves the analysis of song lyrics. As they read the lyrics of “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus and “Rise” by Katy Perry, among others, students can identify the principles of growth mindset found in each song. Students can also use song lyrics to identify and reflect on the factors that support a growth mindset. For example, “Unstoppable” by Rascal Flatts emphasizes the importance of a strong support system, while “A Little Too Much” by Shawn Mendez provides advice on what to do when “it all gets a little too much.”

5) Grammar

Grammar lessons have a reputation for being a little bit dry - but sometimes, adding a small twist can boost your students’ engagement with this essential ELA skill. Teaching with music can be a really useful “hook” for a grammar lesson, especially when you reference your students’ favorite artists!

One effective strategy is to use song lyrics to help students identify and correct common grammar errors. This activity works really well as a station-based learning task, as well as an independent assignment. I like to begin by providing students with a selection of song lyrics that contain incorrect grammar (like “You and me could write a bad romance” from Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”). Once students have identified the error, I like to have them re-write the lyric using correct grammar.

If you want to extend this activity over a longer period of time, you could also create time in your classroom to discuss a musical mistake of the week. In this alternative approach, share a grammatically incorrect song lyric once a week, and have students identify and correct the errors. You can even create an engaging bulletin board display of the various “Musical Mistakes,” which can be refreshed throughout the year!

6) Inferences 

I find that middle and high school students can sometimes struggle to make inferences. If you’d like your students to brush up on this essential comprehension skill, why not add some musical references to your instruction or review? Songs that tell a story can help students make inferences, predict likely outcomes, and “read between the lines.”

For example, students can take a close look at the song “Travelling Soldier” by The Chicks, especially the lyrics: 

 

Our love will never end

Waitin' for the soldier to come back again

Nevermore to be alone

When the letter said, "A soldier's comin' home"

From here, they can make inferences about the contents of the letter as the chorus is repeated throughout the song. Other songs that work really well for teaching inference skills with music include “Back to December” by Taylor Swift, and “Someone Like You” by Adele.

There you have it! Teaching with music in secondary ELA? Check out these related resources from other Coffee Shop teachers!

Firework by Katy Perry Poetry Terms Figurative Language Activities by Tracee Orman

5 Benefits of Sentence Combining in the ELA Classroom

By The Daring English Teacher

I love language. There are seemingly a million different ways to convey messages and write out our thoughts. Knowing the ins and outs of syntax is at the heart of learning how to become a strong writer. That is why I include sentence-combining exercises in my classroom at the start of almost every class period! I want students to actively focus on syntax and think about how they convey their messages to the world. 

Syntax is the structural framework that governs the arrangement of words and phrases within sentences. As ELA teachers, guiding our students to navigate the many intricacies of syntax and master the art of sentence combining is crucial for fostering clarity, coherence, and sophistication in their writing. 

Today, I’m going to share what syntax is and what sentence combining entails and explore five compelling benefits of incorporating sentence combining exercises into our teaching repertoire.

Understanding Syntax:

Syntax refers to the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences. It encompasses the rules and conventions governing sentence structure, including word order, sentence length, punctuation, and grammatical relationships between words. 

By mastering syntax, students gain the ability to craft sentences that communicate their ideas effectively and convey meaning with precision and clarity. Furthermore, developing a profound understanding of syntax also helps students understand and analyze text on a higher, more rhetorical level.

To gain a better understanding of syntax, students first need to know about the parts of speech and sentence structure! And even thought these are skills and concepts that high school students should know, it is always helpful to review these concepts again.

Exploring Sentence Combining:

Sentence combining is a writing technique that involves merging two or more simple sentences into a single, more complex sentence. This process encourages students to experiment with sentence structure, vary sentence length and style, and enhance the fluency and cohesion of their writing. 

By combining sentences, students learn to manipulate syntax, employ a diverse range of sentence patterns, write with a varsity of sentence types, and convey their ideas with greater sophistication and nuance. In essence, practicing sentence combining helps students become better writers.

In my classroom, I like to use these sentence-combining bell ringers to help students actively practice their syntax and writing skills. To make the warm-up activity more fun, I like to add challenges throughout the year. I’ll ask students to rewrite the same sentence three different ways, or I’ll ask them to try to use as few words as possible without compromising any of the content. 

This sentence-combining bell ringer bundle includes enough sentence-combining activities for an entire year of instruction, and it also includes a quick mini-lesson teaching students how to combine sentences!

Five Benefits of Sentence Combining:

1. Enhances Writing Fluency: Sentence-combining exercises encourage students to practice composing sentences fluidly and confidently. By manipulating syntax and experimenting with sentence structure, students develop fluency in expressing their ideas in writing and become more adept at crafting sentences that flow smoothly.
2. Promotes Sentence Variety: Sentence combining promotes sentence structure diversity by introducing students to a range of sentence patterns and styles. By combining short, simple sentences into longer, more complex ones, students learn to vary sentence length, rhythm, and syntax, creating more engaging and dynamic prose.
3. Improves Clarity and Coherence: Through sentence combining, students learn to clarify their ideas and improve the coherence of their writing. By consolidating related ideas into cohesive sentences, students eliminate redundancy and repetition, streamline their writing, and ensure that their ideas are presented logically and coherently.
4. Strengthens Syntax Awareness: Sentence-combining exercises provide students with opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of syntax and sentence structure. By analyzing and manipulating sentences, students become more attuned to the grammatical relationships between words, the role of punctuation, and the nuances of sentence construction.
5. Fosters Creativity and Expressiveness: Sentence combining encourages students to unleash their creativity and explore different ways of expressing themselves through language. By experimenting with syntax and sentence structure, students discover new avenues for conveying their ideas, imbuing their writing with individuality, voice, and style.

If you are interested in giving sentence combining a try, I am sharing an entire week of sentence combining bell ringers with you! To receive the bell ringers, click here and sign up!

To receive the these sentence combining bell ringers, click here and sign up!

Incorporating sentence-combining exercises into your teaching repertoire offers many benefits for students, empowering them to wield syntax with confidence and finesse in their writing endeavors.

Additional sentence combining resources:

Sentence Expanding by Room 213

Sentence Structure Syntax Song Lyric and Poetry Analysis Activities by Tracee Orman

Sentence Structure Types by Presto Plans

5 authentic ways to teach grammar

 

By Jackie from ROOM 213

If you're tired of teaching endless grammar lessons and still getting assignments full of errors, read on! I've got five authentic ways to teach grammar, ones that can lead to fast results.

The red pen has gotten a bad reputation since I began my teaching career thirty years ago. It used to be a symbol of the English teacher who would use it like a weapon, finding ways to slash marks from students. Now of course, that wasn’t always the case, but those of us who were students or teachers during this time remember that a great deal of feedback on our papers was focused on mechanical errors.

When I was in high school, I took a full semester “writing” course on grammar. And yes, I knew what a dangling participle was, and I could diagram a sentence with the best of them. However, I remember the course being deadly dull.  The worst of it was, however, that we did very little writing in that class. It was all about the grammar.

Was that so bad? Perhaps not. Surely students can handle a dull class if they learn something valuable, right?

But what if a student can identify and fix a fused sentence or a fragment in an exercise but can’t do so in their own writing? 

These are questions that we struggle with when planning our instruction, and while  I don’t think there is one “correct” way to teach mechanics, I have strategies you can try that have lead to great results with my students.

I hope you can find something that helps!

THE TARGETED MINI-LESSON

The mini-lesson will always be an excellent way to introduce and teach grammar concepts; however it's what happens after the lesson that matters when it comes to student learning.

Teachers have long used a mini-lesson to teach grammar. However, these lessons were often followed by a session of diagramming sentences, or fixing a series of ten or so sentences that were full of errors. And while students can actually be successful with these activities, research has shown that there is not always much transfer to their actual writing.

What really helps is when students use what they learn in their lessons in more authentic ways. Here are some suggestions for how to do this:

✅  First, make a list of the most common errors you are seeing in your students' writing. My bet is that fragments, fused sentences, and punctuation errors will top the list. Start with these. Then, later in the year, create lessons around the common errors you see in your students' work.

✅  Keep your lessons short and focused on the reasons why writers make the error, so students can see why/how it happens - and how to fix it.

✅  In the lesson include a few sentences that demonstrate the errors and ask students to figure out how to fix them.

✅  Follow up with an activity where students look for this concept/rule in their own reading and writing. For example, ask them to look for properly constructed sentences in their reading - how and why did the writer use commas? Semicolons? Colons? Or, instruct your students to read over a piece of their own writing (a journal entry or a paragraph or longer piece they haver written) and find any fragments, comma errors, etc. and fix them.

✅  At the end of class, assign an exit ticket for quick assessment. Just ask students to write one sentence that demonstrates they know how to use the grammar concept you introduced in your mini-lesson. They can pass this in at the end of class and then you can quickly assess whether they got it or not.

MENTOR SENTENCES

Traditionally, when we want to work on mechanics with our students, we teach them the “rule” then give them worksheets that contain error-ridden sentences that they have to fix. This approach, however, presents students with multiple sentences that are incorrect, and that is what they get used to seeing. The theory behind mentor sentences is that students may be more apt to learn the rules when they see models of well-written sentences. They also use a process of discovery to discern why the mentor sentences work.

The mentor sentence approach does not take away the necessity of a "lesson," it just puts the focus on students trying to figure out why, for example, a semicolon is used in a sentence instead of a comma. Basically, your lesson will start with the correct way of doing things, your students will figure out why it's correct, and then they will learn "the rule."

👉🏻 Grab a PDF with a free mentor text lesson on commas.

EMBEDDED GRAMMAR IN OTHER LESSONS

One of the most effective ways to improve your students' grammar is by embedding opportunities to do so into their reading and writing regularly - not just during specific "grammar time." This is because, when you do this, students will begin to see grammar as a very powerful tool in their writing toolbox, one that will lead to greater clarity in their writing (and a higher grade if that's what motivates them).

Present grammar lessons when they make sense, from learning about capitalizing people's names when you are teaching lessons on character to learning when to use a colon when you look at modern forms of epistolary fiction. If you are working on getting your students to provide more detail and variety in their writing, it's the perfect time to look at how and why authors use commas. If you want to put an end to fragments and fused sentences, do so while doing readings on the fragments and connections in our lives (I've got this one all ready for you!)

You can also teach your students the habit of revision by always asking them to read over short pieces that they write in class to look for places where they can improve both the content and their mechanics. This doesn't have to take long: after they write a prompt, instruct them to read over what they wrote and look for places that could use a semicolon, need a comma, etc.

If you like the idea of combining your instruction and activities when you do reading and writing, click here for ready-made resources that do just that.

TEACH GRAMMAR DURING FEEDBACK

In my experience, this is the most authentic and effective way to help students improve their writing. That is because you are giving them just-in-time feedback that can help them fix the errors that they are actually making, not the ones that you focus on in a mini-lesson for the whole class.

One way to do this is during student conferences. Conferences are a powerful strategy for helping students improve their writing as you are able to talk to them one-on-one and can give them fast, targeted feedback. If you have ones that are focused on particular grammar errors that you have been covering; then students can apply what you have been teaching in an authentic way.

And, if used properly, conferencing can actually reduce your time spent grading. Click here to find out how! Or if you aren't sure how to fit them in, I explain how here.

Another way to give targeted feedback is when students pass in an assignment. Look at the image below. In this case, the student was making multiple comma splice errors. In the first instance, I highlighted it and named the error. Then I highlighted the subsequent ones and asked "what's this?" 

When the student gets the assignment back, I ask them to respond to my questions and fix the error and resubmit. You can see the response in the second image.

This does add another layer onto you giving feedback, but in my experience, if you just ask students to respond to a few things on a returned assignment, it takes very little time to assess - and it leads to a lot more learning.

👉🏻 Click here for more Tips for Fast, Effective Feedback

GRAMMAR LEARNING STATIONS

Another way to review and fix grammar errors is through learning stations. You can do a full review of a concept and send students though a rotation that has them hit each one. Or, you can group students according to need and send them to the stations that cover the errors that they are actually making.

For example, group one may go to a station that reviews pronoun errors while group two is working on sentence fragments. This way, instead of each student listening to a review of an error that other students are making, they are getting extra practice with the ones that they need to improve.

You can check out my grammar stations here. (note: these are all in the process of being updated. Currently, the ones for pronouns and fragments are complete. Fused sentences are next).

So, those are 5 authentic ways to teach grammar. Try at least one of them and see if it leads to improvements in your students' writing. And, if you need some help in teaching grammar, check out the resources below:

✅ Pronouns Errors Mini-lessons

✅ Avoiding Fragments Mini-Lessons & Activities

✅ Comma Mini-Lessons & Activities

✅ Fragments and Connections

✅ Avoiding Awkward Wording

Get more strategies from ROOM 213:

👉🏻 Planning a Novel Study

👉🏻 Scaffolding the Skills for Narrative Writing

👉🏻 5 Strategies for Teaching Author Purpose

My talented friends from the Coffee Shop have some ideas for you too: 

The Classroom Sparrow: Grammar Mistakes Interactive Flip Book

The Daring English Teacher: 5 Fun Ways to Incorporate Grammar

 

6 Ways to Gamify your English Language Arts Classroom

By Presto Plans

Some of the most memorable moments I've had as a teacher—and as a student—were class activities that had competitive elements to them. Maybe you've had a similar experience. Games in the classroom not only serve to entertain and build connections, but they also help students retain important information.

WHAT IS GAMIFICATION IN THE CLASSROOM? 

Gamification is the pedagogical strategy of bringing elements of games into a learning environment in an intentional and thoughtful way in order to improve student skills. This kind of game-based learning helps students to become further engaged in the content while also developing their critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving skills. Furthermore, it provokes students to become more accountable for their own learning, seeing themselves as important members of a team. 

Here are 6 ways that I like to bring gamification into my English language arts classroom.

1. GROUP CHALLENGES

I find competitive challenges to be a really effective way to hook students into important concepts. A healthy dose of competition challenges students to become a little more invested in any given topic. This is especially useful when the topic is something that is traditionally viewed as "boring," like grammar, literary devices, or reading skills. 

If I was teaching how to determine words in context, for example, instead of teaching it the traditional way, I would incorporate an interactive escape room-style challenge to make it more interesting. I'd tell students to imagine they are on a field trip visiting an Egyptian library when, suddenly, they get lost in the stacks and need to replace words in an ancient Egyptian text to escape and get to the airport before they are left behind. You can grab this specific vocabulary in context activity for FREE by clicking here. 

I also like to use challenges for grammar. When I'm teaching how to properly use commas in a series, I engage the students in a narrative where they imagine themselves as world-renowned anthropologists in search of Mayan ruins and treasures in the jungle who find themselves stuck in a maze of stone tiles in a Pyramid. They will need to count how many commas are missing from various small manuscripts in order to escape without harm. Grab this FREE grammar challenge by clicking here.

I like to really incorporate a lot of group challenges into my curriculum, and I recommend two programs, in particular, to carry you through the school year if you want to use lots of challenges to engage your students:  

• The Reading Challenge
• The Grammar Challenge

 

2. CLASSROOM ESCAPE ROOMS 

We often tend to think that escape rooms entail high-tech supplies and a lot of preparation, but really, all you need to have for an escape room is paper. At their core, escape rooms are stations with puzzles, challenges, or games. They don't have to be more complicated than that. 

ELA escape rooms are great tools for developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills in the classroom. Students move around the classroom in groups, and they use their ELA skills to decode challenges or solve puzzles to get a code or a mystery word related to the skill that they are learning. 

For example, I love to use escape rooms for things that have correct and incorrect answers, such as figurative language, grammar, commas, parts of speech, and more! 

3. SOLVING A MYSTERY

Having students solve a mystery helps them with thinking differently. They will need to read between the lines, use their background knowledge, and think critically to come up with a solution or a theory. My two favorite inference activities are: 

• Free Inference Mystery: Your students will love the opportunity to get to play detective at a fictional crime scene. For this Who Kidnapped the Principal activity, the students arrive at school to learn that their principal has been kidnapped. The students infer evidence and interviews to try and help the superintendent determine who the culprit might be.

• Ship Mystery: This activity is especially interesting because it is based on the real mystery of a 1978 construction crew discovering a ship buried underground in the middle of downtown San Francisco. For this one, students watch a hand-drawn video that tells the backstory and speculate on the purpose the ship once served and on why it remained buried for so many years without being discovered. You can grab this activity here. 

4. ELA SKILLS REVIEW GAME

Review games have been used forever as a way to prepare for assessment and there is a reason they stand the test of time: they're fun...and they work! I remember, back when I was in school, we used to play Jeopardy as a way to review material in class. It was SO fun! Everyone was so engaged, and there was so much enthusiasm for what we were learning. 

We can still do this in the ELA classroom by taking classic games like Pictionary, Scrabble, Jeopardy, or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and find ways to tweak these games to make them ELA skills-based. Now, in the digital age, there are so many more options as well, such as Kahoot!, Quizizz, and Quizlet Live. 

5. BOARD GAMES

Board games can be used effectively in two different ways in the ELA classroom: for review or for students to create their own board games. 

Board games for review:

I've created board games for students to review important elements of a text we've read or to practice a skill. When I read The Most Dangerous Game in my class (which has "game" in the title), it felt especially appropriate to make a related game for the class. So, I created a board game where students had to answer basic comprehension questions, analysis questions, vocabulary questions, and I added parts of the plot into the game board. For example, "Zarroff is injured in a trap - move ahead two spaces."

Having some ready-made game board templates for this is also always a great idea.

Have students create their own:

After learning a new concept or reading a new text, have students create their own. Through the process of creating their own game, they will learn the content more deeply without even realizing it. You could have them focus on the overall story or focus in one one specific element.  For example, students could create a figurative language-based game, which would cause them to dive more deeply into the examples of this—and the effect they have—in the text. 

6. CLASS READING COMPETITIONS

Competition amongst individual readers doesn't always work as well because of the disparity in reading levels within the classroom. With that said, classroom competitions between your different ELA blocks can be an effective way to inspire community reading goals where you're all working together to compete against the other classes. You can hype up the competition by having...

• Quarterly prizes for the most books read per class.
• Reading points, badges, or levels. 
• Colored rings for each class that gets extended with each new book read. 
• Paper bookshelves that keep the score of what's been read by each class so far.
• Perks for both classes when reaching reading milestones (i.e. class outside).
• Pizza Party for the winning class. 

Incentivizing your students in any of these will make a positive impact on their reading throughout the year. 

When adding gamification to your ELA classroom, it's important to remember that not all games are created equal. Skill development needs to be at the heart of the game, and the purpose needs to be clear.

Hopefully, now having read these suggestions, you and your students will be able to enjoy the many benefits of adding more play to the classroom. 

Looking for other ways to bring games into ELA?  The Coffee Shop bloggers have you covered!

Game Board Templates by Secondary Sara

Reading Activities Escape Room by The Classroom Sparrow

Literary Terms Review Game by Tracee Orman

Enhance Learning with Games and Challenges by Learning in Room 213

ELA Escape Room Template Kit by Nouvelle ELA

How to Teach Grammar Online

By Presto Plans 

Grammar can be a challenge at the best of times in the traditional paper and pencil classroom, so if you have moved to remote teaching or are a 1:1 device school, you may be wondering how you will help your students improve their grammar digitally.

Moving grammar into a digital format can certainly have its challenges.  You are no doubt continuing to see students making errors (have you been cringing at some of the emails they're sending you?), so I’m here to help you with some strategies and resources that you can use to make this transition easier. 

 

1. MEET STUDENTS WHERE THEY ARE

 

Before you begin planning how to incorporate grammar into your lessons, you'll want to make sure you are meeting students where they are.  In order to plan out what grammar topics you want to address, you’ll need to assess their current understanding.  Doing this digitally can take on two forms: 

Option 1

If you only want to assess their understanding of a particular grammar topic, you can create a Google Forms multiple choice quiz (make sure to make it self-grading!).  This works well for a quick check of a specific topic, but there are some draw-backs.  For starters, students may be able to guess the correct answer. Also, sometimes students will be able to correct errors when they are searching for them in a question, but they don’t always transfer that new knowledge to their own writing seamlessly.

Option 2

Have students complete a writing piece on Google Docs to share with you to assess their writing and see the areas that need improvement.  I prefer this method because it feels more authentic, and you will get to see students' mistakes in context.  

If you choose to use option 2, assign a quick write based on a writing prompt. After they are done, have them submit the work to you via Google Docs. You can use the "add a comment" tool to give them three areas to work on applying in their writing.  This will give you a list of check-in items whenever students submit writing in the future and will make students more aware of repetitive errors that they are making.  It will also allow you to keep track of common errors made by your students in general to better know where to focus your instruction.

 

2. GAMIFY YOUR GRAMMAR

 

Trying to find ways to make grammar fun and interactive for students can sometimes be a painful process. There is nothing worse than hearing groans and grumbles when you tell students that you will be teaching a grammar mini-lesson. 

Grammar does not have to be this way, and that’s why about a year ago, I started on a mission to create a grammar program that gamified grammar.  There's nothing like a little bit of competition to spark some engagement. That's why I created The Grammar Challenge Program. 

The Grammar Challenge is a full year, 40-week digital (and print) grammar program for middle and high school English language arts teachers that includes assessment instruction narrative stories and escape room style challenges to help students improve their grammar, problem solving, and critical thinking skills. 

So, how does it work?

• Before diving into the escape room challenge, students complete a short pre-assessment quiz on the grammar topic. 

• Then, you can use the presentation slides to teach the mini lesson on the grammar concept. 

• Have students read the creative backstory for the challenge. This will set up a challenge and also help students improve their reading comprehension and allow them to see good grammar in context. Each of the stories place students in a scenario where they must escape, find a secret message or code, or solve a problem.

• Then, students can work in small groups to try to do the escape-room style challenge. If you are teaching remotely, it can also be done independently if group work isn’t a possibility! 

• You can also choose to give students the pre-assessment again to see if they are able to improve their initial grade now that they have a better understanding.

Try one of the digital challenges for FREE here to help your students understand using commas in a list! The resource includes both print and digital versions.

Want to try more?  Learn all about the full-year program here.

Want to pick and choose which ones to use? Browse the individual challenges here.

3. TEACH GRAMMAR IN THE CONTEXT OF READING AND WRITING

 

Whether digitally or not, teaching grammar solely as an isolated subject from writing is not effective. It's so important while teaching using devices to still provide a multitude of opportunities for extensive reading and writing. Seeing good grammar used in reading will help students model it in their own writing.  Finding and correcting their own mistakes in writing will help them grow and improve their own grammar.  The best grammar instruction includes both mini-lessons on grammar topics while also teaching grammar in the context with reading and writing.   

  

 It's important to empower your students to improve their own grammar using authentic experiences. So, how can you do this?  These can all be done within the traditional classroom as well, but here are a few ideas for teaching grammar within the context of reading and writing that can still be done digitally: 

 

• Have them evaluate the sentence structure, punctuation, or grammar used within a text that they are reading.

• Have them read their own writing aloud (they might even consider recording it and listening back). This helps them identify mistakes more easily.

• Have them attempt to model or imitate an author's writing style and mimic their sentence structures and mechanics.

 

4. USE MINI-LESSON VIDEOS

Although you certainly do not want to teach grammar in a vacuum, some direct instruction on grammar concepts is useful. Use mini-lessons to introduce students to grammar rules in a focussed way. 

 

Doing this digitally can work even better because you can create concise, yet thorough, video lessons that will allow students to learn a particular grammar concept. What's great is that they can learn them at their own individual pace. If they don't understand something, they can replay the video, take notes, and ask questions in an attempt to apply that knowledge to their own writing. 

 

You might consider using Loom to record mini grammar lessons. Loom combines video with the convenience of messaging.  Simply use Loom to record your screen with your lesson, then simply share the link that loom generates with students. It will give you the option of using screen + cam, only screen, or only cam.

You can also easily teach a mini-lesson over Zoom or Google Meet if that is something you are using with your students, but try to keep the lesson to 10 minutes max.  Grammar is a subject that students can tune out on pretty quickly, so you'll want to keep direct instruction to a minimum.

 

Not able to share your own videos with students?   YouTube has lots of grammar mini-lessons to share with your students.

 

5. TEXTING, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND EMAIL SELF-ASSESSMENT

 

When it comes to student communication, texting, social media, and email is often where grammar fails are rampant.  If students can start to evaluate their own grammar fails in these mediums, they may be able to start making incremental changes that will then translate to their own writing outside of their device. Try putting grammar in a real-world context by having students examine their own texts, social media posts, and emails to see or evaluate their own grammar usage.  If you can get them to see the errors they are making, they may take a pause the next time before hitting send (especially when they are emailing you!)  An extension activity to this might be to have students examine their favorite celebrity’s social media to evaluate their grammar.

 

If students aren’t able to check their own messages, you might even consider writing your own text messages or social media posts to have students correct the errors they find.  You can use this website to create fake text message conversations to share with your students or use this bank of texts with grammar errors and bank of social media posts with errors that I created.

6. DON'T FEAR THE AUTOCORRECT

Many teachers do not like the autocorrect features on computers, but we must face it that autocorrect is going to always be a part of students' lives, and these features will only be getting better and better. Instead of fearing autocorrect, use it to your advantage. 

Help students learn the shortcuts they need to use grammar autocorrect effectively. Here are a few other ways of how you can use autocorrect features to your advantage:  

• Teach students that if they hit the spacebar twice while texting it will automatically put a period and start the next sentence with a capital letter.   While some teachers might think this doesn't mean students are making corrections on their own, we must remember that they need to know where to double-tap the spacebar so the knowledge is still there.

• Have students try to properly voice text punctuation.  This will allow them to be more thoughtful about where punctuation needs to go.  To do this, open a Google Doc and select Tools > Voice Texting.  When students say “period” or “comma” it will insert the punctuation into their writing.

• Have spell check turned on, but when a student comes across a word that they misspell, have them look at the suggested spelling and have them retype it instead of autocorrecting it with the click feature.  

• Look at the grammar suggestions (green underlines) and have them explain to you why the tech has provided that suggestion.  Sometimes, it doesn’t actually need to be changed!  The computer is not always right, so it provides an opportunity for evaluation on the part of the student. 

Grammar still has its place in the digital classroom.  Even from a distance or in a 1:1 classroom, you can help your students make improvements to their grammar on their devices.

Looking for more resources to help you teach grammar online?  

Digital Parts of Speech Review by Addie Williams 

Self-Grading Grammar Units by Secondary Sara